Department of Popular Culture

Hello and welcome to the web site of
the Department of Popular Culture at Bowling Green State University!

We offer a unique opportunity for undergraduate students to earn a
Bachelor of Arts degree with a Popular Culture Major and for graduate
students to earn a Masters Degree in Popular Culture. Undergraduate
students majoring in any field can take approved Popular Culture
courses to meet BGSU humanities requirements and can complete a
Popular Culture Minor or a Folklore Minor in our department. We
regularly offer both graduate and undergraduate courses in popular
music, television, film, and folklore, as well as courses that focus
on how to research and analyze popular culture and its impact on
society. Each year our faculty also develop and teach courses on more
specialized topics of interest to students. The 10 full-time
faculty in the Department of Popular Culture hold doctoral degrees in
American Culture, Anthropology, Asian Studies, Ethnic Studies,
Folklore, and Women's Studies: we share an interest in bringing these
different perspectives to our research and teaching about popular
culture. We define popular culture as the
expressive practices of everyday life (including mass media products
such as television shows and video games, but also individualized
forms of expression like food and holidays). This community
of interest extends beyond the classroom to events sponsored by the
department’s Center for Popular Culture Studies, such as
an on-going series of monthly lectures organized by students, and
conferences on emerging issues involving popular culture, such as the
April 2010 Asian Popular Culture Symposium and 2013 Heavy Metal and
Popular Culture Conference. We define popular culture as the
expressive practices of everyday life (including mass media products
such as television shows and video games, but also individualized
forms of expression like food and holidays). In our courses and our
research, we look at the many different ways people use, interpret and
adapt even the most conventional mass-produced items in the course of
our daily lives. We also study the more spectacular practices of
groups of people who develop new cultural forms as well as maintain
traditional ones. We are especially interested in the ways the
expressive practices of popular culture convey, challenge and
influence social values, norms of behavior, and sense of identity. We
study the exchanges and transformations of popular culture in global
and historical contexts as well as among diverse groups within
contemporary American society. While popular culture may at first
appear to be a trivial matter, it turns out to be the site where many
of the most important and controversial issues are explored and
debated. This site is maintained by the Department of Popular
Culture and has been organized to help those outside of the BGSU
community learn as much as possible about our faculty, courses, degree
programs, and events. Please send comments and/or suggestions and
general questions about the program to the department at popc@bgsu.edu.
You may also contact faculty, graduate students, and staff directly by
obtaining their contact information from the Faculty
& Staff link. Please refer to the website for information
about colloquia, conferences, lectures, and other events.
Sincerely, Jeremy Wallach, Acting Department Chair and Graduate
Coordinator 228 Shatzel Hall 419-372-2796

A Message to Reporters and Journalists:

If you would like to interview a faculty member of the
Department of Popular Culture for a story you are working on, please
consider these options:

(1) Consult the Faculty
& Staff link, review the biographical information for each
faculty member, and directly contact the faculty member who best fits
your story needs or

(2) Contact the Department Chair,
Dr. Jeremy Wallach, by e-mail (jeremyw@bgsu.edu), briefly describing the story you
are writing, stating your deadline, and listing a phone number where
you can be reached; she will distribute the e-mail to the faculty and
they will individually respond to your request. In all cases, faculty
members will return phone calls or e-mails at their earliest convenience.

ACCESSIBILITY

Bowling Green State University (BGSU) has built their website around the Standards of the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) 5 and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). The website was built in compliance with the accessibility standards established by section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act and detailed in section 1194.22 of the Code of Federal Regulations, “Web-based intranet and internet information and applications” (https://www.section508.gov/).

BGSU utilizes many web masters across campus to maintain all of its web properties. Keeping the BGSU website in compliance with section 508 is a joint effort between Disability Services, Marketing and Communications and Information Technology Services. If any page is discovered to be inaccessible, please report it using the above link and we will ensure that the issue is addressed.

Events

To our guests with disabilities, please indicate if you need special services, assistance or appropriate modifications to fully participate in this event by contacting Disability Services, dss@bgsu.edu, 419-372-8495. Please notify us prior to the event.